[ExI] nick's book being sold by fox news

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Anders,

Wow, do you remember having this exact conversation 2 years ago?  I 
started on a reply to your post, and then had that deja-vu feeling, so I 
did a quick search and found this:

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2012-December/075438.html

And we've probably had similare conversations other years.  It is 
surprizing how identical the situation was back then, and how the 
response I was working on right now, is almost identical to what I said 
back then.  Except for my response, like your response this time, is of 
far less quality, and we obviously spent far less time on them, this 
time around.  In other words, it seems that the quality of our 
conversation is degrading, over time, and certainly not improving.  
Primarily because of lack of memory.  This is precisely the kind of 
waste of time infinitely repetitive bleating that I am talking about.

It seems to me that if you would have taken less time, back then, to 
simply include what you said back then, in canonizer.com, rather than 
posting it here, our conversation, today, would have been much improved, 
rather than degrading, and would have taken far less time.  And, there 
is a good chance that someone else would have been able to add to the 
conversation, in a competing camp, or improving what you could have 
said, improving things even further.

Perhaps you think that you can't add anything to Canonizer.com, unless 
it is of peer review quality.   No wonder you think you don't have 
time.  That is not the way the amplification of the wisdom of the crowd 
canonization process works.  In other words, all that is required is 
less effort than is being applied to this repeated every year, 
conversation to make significant progress.

Some people assume we think what is in canonizer.com as "truth", which 
it is clearly not, and thankfully you don't think that it contains 
"truth".  But you do seem to expect it to be some kind of 'unbiased' 
survey of what all experts think.  It isn't!  It is JUST a state of the 
art real time representative of what all participants currently believe 
(without having to read hundreds of individual responses).

And the best part of all of it, is how much time it does save.

I trust you very much, because of what I've seen from you, and will 
admit that you are probably at a much higher level of intelligence on 
such issues, than I am able to comprehend.  But, even if what you 
understand isn't yet contained in Canonizer.com, what is there is of far 
greater quality, than would be if I, and everyone else, would have just 
produced a long diatribe response to every single time someone says 
something like "I don't see how anyone could argue such and such."  
Instead of repeating the same degrading over time diatribe, every time, 
all I have to do is refer people to my camp.

True, all the worlds best experts haven't yet participated in the survey 
on qualia and consciousness.  But I would argue that the so called 'peer 
reviewed' articles coming out of the ivory tower on this subject are 
making little, if any progress, especially compared to what these 
participating in the amplification of the wisdom of the crowd hobbyists
have achieved at Canonizer.com.  I am obviously biased, but I think what 
is already there is vastly superior to anything coming out of the Ivory 
tower and so called "peer reviewed" journals that all can easily be 
argued as being very biased to one school of thought or another.

And we no longer have those infinitely repeated, degrading over time 
arguments about qualia, like were so painful for everyone so often, 
before Canonizer.com.  Remember how so many people would get angry every 
time someone even mentioned qualia?

Brent Allsop









On 10/27/2014 5:34 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Brent Allsop<brent.allsop at canonizer.com> , 27/10/2014 10:46 PM:
>
>
>     http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/16
>
>     There are very strong arguments for why concern over AI is just
>     dumb, a complete waste of time, and so far at least, there is more
>     consensus for these arguments, than there are for the fear
>     mongering camps.
>
>
> I think this shows the problem with Canonizer. The "Concern over 
> "Unfriendly" AI is a Mistaken Waste of Time" camp's claim 
> "Intelligence is necessarily Moral" does not engage with existing 
> (peer reviewed) literature (c.f. 
> http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11023-012-9281-3 - free 
> versions exist online too) or known counterexamples (AIXI-style 
> paperclippers).
>
> I know, I know, the proper response is of course for me to form yet 
> another camp and add these arguments. And so on. Fine. But I do not 
> have the time. And I happen to *like* the idea of Canonizer.
>
> The problem is that you need a significant critical mass, and it needs 
> to include the people who actually know stuff. This is a hard problem 
> when trying to get an entire debate onto a single forum: the LessWrong 
> crowd are pretty busy over there, and we at FHI/MIRI are writing 
> papers (or grant proposals) over here. So you get the same situation 
> as for information markets with too little liquidity: very biased and 
> chunky information because it only represents whoever happens to be 
> posting or the imprints of somebody with social capital sending out a 
> call for activity.
>
> It seems to me that in order to get debates like this done properly we 
> need better ways of feeding existing literatures into the Canonizer 
> framework to produce initial scaffoldings so there is no need for the 
> locals to reinvent the wheel in a biased way. And then there is the 
> vexing question of how to ensure a steady flow of commenters - in my 
> Wikipedia models that turned out to be more important than their 
> average quality.
>
>
> Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of 
> Oxford University
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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